1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to technology for processing query strings.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the impact of the Internet continues to alter the economic landscape, companies are experiencing a fundamental shift in how they do business. Business processes involve complex interactions between companies and their customers, suppliers, partners and employees. For example, businesses interact constantly with their customers—often other businesses—to provide information on product specification and availability. Businesses also interact with vendors and suppliers in placing orders and obtaining payments. Businesses must also make a wide array of information and services available to their employee populations, generating further interactions.
To meet new challenges and leverage opportunities, while reducing their overall cost-of-interactions, many organizations are migrating to network-based business processes and models. Among the most important of these is Internet-based E-business.
To effectively migrate their complex interactions to an Internet-based E-business environment, organizations must contend with a wide array of challenges and issues. For example, businesses need to securely provide access to business applications and content to users they deem authorized. This implies that businesses need to be confident that unauthorized use is prevented. Often, this involves the nontrivial, ongoing task of attempting to tie together disparate, system-specific authentication and/or authorization schemes.
E-business is also challenged with cohesively managing disparate end user, application, content, policy and administrative information. Historically, user and authorization information have been stored in application-specific formats and often on a per-application basis. It is labor intensive to maintain consistency across the disparate repositories and, thus, the cost for user and policy administration increase as more application and content are added. Such an aggregated system is difficult to replicate and scale. This can lead to operational errors, poor user experiences, and loss of confidence in the E-business by all those concerned.
Another challenge facing E-business is how to scale the E-business over time. A successful E-business network, its applications, and content must be able to seamlessly scale from a modest flood of requests to a torrent. At the same time, it must be able to scale administratively. Increases in traffic, users, and content require additional administrative effort. To avoid bottlenecks, scaling must be accomplished in a decentralized, delegated fashion. This includes incorporating associated portals seamlessly into the E-business network. Because E-businesses often accumulate various disparate systems, they need to offer a seamless experience to users and not unduly burden administrators.
To meet these challenges, an E-business host company needs a web access management solution that delivers the ability to effectively secure and manage all the various network-based interactions.
Previous access management systems have not fully provided for the increase in volume of users and content. In today's business climate, the quantity of content protected, the volume of traffic and the number of users accessing the system is enormous. It is up to one or more administrators to provide access rules for the various content. These access rules determine who can access what content. As the amount of content and the number of users increase dramatically, managing these rules becomes difficult. For example, as the number of resources protected by an access management system becomes large, it is difficult to provide and manage separate access rules for each individual resource. There needs to be an efficient means for grouping resources together, creating access rules for these groups and matching these access rules with URLs (or other identifiers or requests).